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GoC commits funding to growers to address labour challenges

Five projects will receive up to $1M each in federal funding under Phase 2 of the Innovative Solutions Canada (ISC) program – Challenge Stream.

The five projects approved for funding under AAFC will target the Canadian agriculture and agri-food industries. On top of two meat processing projects, the recipients include::

• Exonetik Inc. – Developing a robotic arm to work alongside humans to harvest fruits and vegetables
• Mycionics Inc. – Developing a robotic mushroom harvester, packer and harvester lift
• Kinova Inc. – Developing a robotic arm to pick, harvest and de-leaf cucumbers and strawberries

Pascal Larose, CEO and co-founder of Exonetik, said in a statement that such automated tasks “until now could only be performed by humans. With the support of Innovative Solutions Canada, we will complete the development of the first marketable version of teleoperable haptic robot arms, capable of learning from human operators and automatically reproducing the same operations, with a sensitivity and adaptability unattainable by industrial or collaborative robots.”